The Priest And The Poet

James Kavanaugh Continues His Journey

April 23, 1995|By Annie Gowen. Special to the Tribune.

His hat, a tan fedora that has seen better days, rests next to his hands, clutching what for him is a rare beer. The hands are decidedly unremarkable, but despite everything, they are still able to lay upon a troubled friend's head as if in benediction.

He seems exactly at home here, as he is in the world-James Kavanaugh, poet, wandering spirit and ex-priest. He is at a pool hall in a sterile strip mall in Vernon Hills, reciting poetry over the sound of the jukebox and the shouts and murmurs of a 5 o'clock Friday happy hour:

My blood flows from some ancient spring

In a silent, country graveyard

Nestled among green hills

Covered with mist in the morning

Where the fog drenches the grass

And gives ghostly shapes to the trees. . . .

It's a poem called "From the Past," and he goes on to the end of it, making sure he is heard.

As a rule, his poetry is populist for, according to his figures, his books-both poetry and prose-have sold more than 7 million copies. Sometimes he can be sentimental (he uses the word "love" a lot, unembarrassed by it) but this time he is speaking and it is beautiful, beautiful.

It has been almost 30 years since James Kavanaugh, then Father K, wrote the book that would first make him famous, an impassioned treatise against what he considers the outmoded social constraints of Catholicism: "A Modern Priest Looks at His Outdated Church" (Steven J. Nash, $13.95). In it he derides precepts involving celibacy, birth control and divorce.

His exit from the the church he both loved and hated came in a famous speech at the University of Notre Dame, where he threw off his Roman collar and said, "To hell with it!"

Since then he has become a well-known poet, endured a paralyzing years-long bout with depression, married and divorced twice, lived around the United States and abroad, written more than 20 books (first for big New York publishers such as E.P. Dutton and Simon & Schuster, now for his own publishing company in Highland Park) and won fans from the famous (actress Dyan Cannon) to the infamous (O.J. Simpson, now ordering his books from jail).

"He's a pilgrim," says his friend India Garnett, a minister to the homeless in Harrisburg, Pa. "He's not aimless. No, his soul is on a journey, a journey to God. And he's inviting everybody to come along.

"He went into the priesthood, and he's still a priest," Garnett continues. "He's not active in A church, but he's active in THE church, the one that belongs to everyone."

As for the Catholic Church, he says he "outgrew it." Indeed, although he has left the traditional constraints of the priesthood far behind, he is still spreading his particular kind of spirituality through his books and poems, counseling many meets.

"You know how many people go to my church?" Kavanaugh asks. "Hundreds of thousands."

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The real church, as Jim Kavanaugh sees it, knows not pews and steeples; the church is a global group joined together by the spirit of God.

In practice, Kavanaugh shows complete disregard for material possessions. About six months ago, he gave away all his furniture, the beautiful teak table from Thailand and the handmade walnut one from Africa, purchased during stints overseas. Now in his Lake Forest apartment, he has an office table from which he eats, a few scroungy tables and chairs, a mattress on the floor, a television and a small boom box.

When she did one for Kavanaugh in 1991, which ran on the Nostalgia cable channel for a time, she carefully chose his outfit beforehand to make sure he wore his nicest sweater. She'd forgotten, however, to oversee his shoes and socks, which were, respectively, beat-up old dogs and electric blue.

"He's not the least bit interested in material things," she says. "He had on these beat-up old shoes that seemed perfectly fine to him, and bright blue socks that didn't even begin to match the sweater he had on and in point of fact stood out like a sore thumb. Anyone else doing a television show centered on them would have purchased a whole new wardrobe, but Jim simply cannot be bothered. To the depth of his soul, the only concern is human beings."

Yes, along the way Kavanaugh has amassed quite a motley crew of human beings, many of whom stress (independently of the others) that finding Jim Kavanaugh was like instantly finding a soul mate. And this crew ranges from the infomercial producer in Minneapolis to a financial planner in Chicago to a black minister in Philadelphia to an eightyish band leader in Las Vegas. Each day he checks in with some of them, many of whom are sick or going through emotional turmoil, to talk and pray and catch up. Consequently, more than one gets teary when discussing him.